Thus thwarted, Dudley could make them feel that the royal governor had some prerogatives; and so he rejected the councillors which the deputies accredited. All of this thrust and parry was of course duly reported by Dudley to the home government. The situation was perplexing in the extreme, quite as much so to the governor as to the people, who reluctantly received him. It was for the interests of both that the war against the French should not flag, and money was necessary, but the governor claimed the direction of expenditures, while the representatives stood aloof and firm on the “privilege and right of English subjects to raise and dispose of money, according to the present exigency of affairs.” With the clergy and the ministers, Dudley was not less unhappily placed. His interests turned him to the church people, but they could not find that his profession had any constancy. His lineage placed him with the Congregationalists, and he once had the ministry in view, but his sympathies went altogether with the new school, of which Stoddard, of Northampton, was leader in the west, while Colman, the Leveretts, and the Brattles were the spokesmen in Boston. In the election of a president for Harvard, Dudley favored Leverett, the successful candidate, and made a Latin speech at his installation,[196] and Cotton Mather writhed at the disappointment of his own hopes. The governor encountered (1708), for his decisive opposition to the Mathers, a terrible but overwrought letter from the father, and a livelier epistle from the son. He showed in his reply a better temper, if nothing more.[197] In the opinion of all honest patriots, of whatever party, Dudley was later found in company which raised suspicions. The conflict with France begat, as wars do, a band of miscreants ever ready to satisfy their avarice by trading with the enemy and furnishing them with arms. Dudley did not escape suspicion, and he experienced some of the bitterest abuse in talk and pamphlet,[198] though the council and the House, the latter after some hesitancy, pronounced the charges against him a “scandalous accusation.” It can hardly be determined that he was implicated, and Palfrey gives him the benefit of the doubt.[199]
JEAN BAPTISTE HERTEL, SEIGNEUR DE ROUVILLE.
This likeness of the leader of the assault on Deerfield follows one given in Daniel’s Nos Gloires Nationales, i. p. 278, where is an account of the Hertel family. He was thirty-four at the time of his attack.
The war was a fearful one. In 1703, month by month fresh tidings of its horrors among the frontier towns reached Boston. In January it was of Berwick, in Maine. In February came sad tidings from Haverhill. In March there was the story of Deerfield, and how Hertel de Rouville had dashed upon the village. With the early summer Dudley went to Canso to confer with the Indians (June 20); and not long after (July 8), Bombazeen, a noted Indian, appeared in Boston with rumors of the French landing near Pemaquid. In August there were sad messages from Wells, and Capt. Southack was sent off by sea with chaplain and surgeon. With all this need of her troops at home, the colony also despatched two companies of foot to help the British forces at Jamaica. Samuel Sewall mourned as ever, when on Sunday (April 23, 1704) great guns at the Castle signalized the Coronation-Day. “Down Sabbath! Up St. George!” he says. The very next day the first number of the Boston News-Letter (April 24)[200] brought to the minister’s study and to his neighbor’s keeping-room the gossip and news of the town which was witnessing this startling proof of progress. Ten days later Dudley signed Benjamin Church’s instructions (May 4), and the old soldier, whose exploits in Philip’s war were not forgotten, set off by land to Piscataqua, where he was met by Cyprian Southack in his brigantine, who carried him to the eastern garrisons. In the News-Letter, people read of the tribulations at Lancaster; of the affairs at Port Royal; of the new cannon which Dudley got from England for the Castle; of the French captives, whose presence in Boston so disturbed the selectmen that they petitioned the governor to restrain the strangers, and whose imagined spiritual needs prompted Cotton Mather to print in his tentative French his Le vrai patron des saines paroles.
News of this sort was varied by a rumor (December 18, 1705), which a sloop from the English Plymouth had brought, that Sir Charles Hobby was to be made governor,—which meant that the agents of the colony in London were trying to oust Dudley with a new man; but in this they failed.
The war made little progress. The expedition against Port Royal in 1707 was a failure, and the frontier towns were still harassed. The news of Marlborough’s victories was inspiriting, and Boston could name a part of its main thoroughfare after the great soldier; but while she planted guns on her out-wharves and hoisted a tar-barrel to her beacon’s top, and while Colonel Vetch marshalled her troops,[201] she waited in vain for the English army to arrive, in concert with which the New England forces were to make a renewed attack on Port Royal in 1709. Rhode Island sent her war-vessels and two hundred men, and they too lay listlessly in Nantasket roads. Schuyler, of Albany, meanwhile started to conduct four Mohawks or Maqua chiefs to England, where he hoped to play upon the imagination of the queen; and in August, while the weary New Englanders were waiting for the signal to embark, Schuyler brought the savages to Boston, and Colonel Hobby’s regiment was mustered for their diversion.[202] Very likely they were taken to see the “celebrated Cotton Mather,” as the man who had not long before “brought in another tongue to confess the great Saviour of the world,” as he himself said of a tract in the language of the Iroquois, which he had printed in Boston (1707) and supplied to the Dutch and English traders among that people. Distractions and waiting wore away the time; but the English forces never came, and another Port Royal attempt proved wretchedly futile.
That autumn (October, 1709) the New England governors met at Rehoboth, and prepared an address to the queen urging another attempt. In the face of these events the Massachusetts colony had to change its London agent. Sir Henry Ashurst died, and the House would have chosen Sir William Ashurst against Dudley’s protest, if Sir William would have accepted. They now selected their own Jeremiah Dummer, but against his desires.